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At last, someone has taken a stand against the tooth whitener ad menace. It’s no tiny or obscure ad network: it’s Google. The company has decided to live up to its “don’t be evil” motto and ban advertisers who place ads that lead to sites peddling products like scammy free trials, get-rich-quick schemes, and malware. Previously, they would ban individual ads, but not advertisers. This was akin to playing a massive game of whack-a-mole with thousands of identical “local moms” who had identified the secret to weight loss. Or tooth whitening. Or stretch marks. Or…

Seen via Boing Boing, seen via Battelle, this list of the top Google AdWords. We’re not ashamed to admit that we’re amazed at the strong showing of mesothelioma on the list… hell, we had to look it up. Who knew absestos huffers were such a lucrative clientele? The rest of the list, of course, is an interesting vivisection of the American psyche: debt and lawsuits are the biggest businesses.

Hot on the heels of reader Charles Flint’s nightmare with Google’s Adwords program comes the announcement that Google will be paying out 90 million in refunds to advertisers who paid Google money for cases of click fraud.

Yikes. Reader Charlie Flint just wrote in with this horror story. The short: Google bills him $3,000 dollars for an Adwords account that he doesn’t actually have. To our untrained eye, this sounds very much like someone has gotten his bank details somehow and is using Google Adwords to funnel money out of his account, but we’re no experts. Can anyone with similar or not-so-similar experience tell Charlie what the hell is going on and what he can do about it?

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